Ready for production use

Charles Peper

We just bought the Telerik suite of controls mainly because we needed a speller and the free ones had some issues. So we assumed a pay one would be relatively bug free.
Unfortunately, the Telerik one has just as many issues, maybe worse ones.
We found that if you have fixed size spell checking area, the text overflows the boundaries when the control is disabled.
We also found the spell checker to be unusable if you have a control in a page which is several screens long.
The browser window scrolls around and hides the text every time it finds a misspelled word.
Both of these behaviors are observable on the Telerik demo page if you put in a lot of text.

I was wondering if the community feels that the Telerik controls (speller and others) are ready for use in a production environment?

We found a work around for the first issue but the second one won't be fixed until the next quarterly release. This leaves us in a bad way because their is no way I would torture a user with the browser scrolling issue.

Tervel

Please allow me to provide some additional comments on the matter, as there is some potentially misleading information. The product you refer to is not RadSpell, but RadEditor. The original problem you reported, technically speaking, is not a bug in RadEditor - it is in fact expected, standards-compliance browser behavior.

For clarity and convenience of other users that might come accross this thread, I will post your original question, as well as the answer provided by us

QUESTION

I am using the
Editor in an ASP.Net application which provides the user an interface
to both view and edit information. In view mode I place the editor in a
disabled mode and in edit I enable the editor. I have set the height of
the editor to 100px and to AutoResizeHeight. The follow is the exact
implementation:

The effect I am looking for is so that the starting height of the
editor be 100px, resize as content is added, and remain resized when in
view mode (disabled). In IE the behavior I want is occuring. In Mozilla
however the editor will resize when enabled and editing content; once
the editor is disabled the content overflows onto the text below the
editor.

To test the behavior and ensure my css in the page were not effecting
the editor and that I was implementing the editor correctly i tested
the demo control under First Look > Edit Modes. If you select
Enable, enter content into the editor to excede 400px, and select
Disable you will see the behavior I am experiencing. Of course you only
see the overflow in Mozilla.

The behavior you have described is not a bug, but a correct behavior in
the standards compliant browsers. This is why your webpage works as
expected under Internet Explorer 6 - simply because IE6 is not a
standards compliant browser and has a faulty box model.

Let me explain in brief the correct box model. Imagine that you have an
element with dimensions 100 x 100 pixels. Now, add content or another
element which dimensions exceed these 100 x 100 pixels, and test the
page under FireFox, Safari, Chrome, IE7/8 or Opera. You will notice
that the content inside this element will not make it larger, but will
simply overflow beyond it. This is the correct box model. To put things
to work in such cases you may use the min-width: 100px or width: auto
to that particular element. In the first case if your element is empty,
or its contents do not exceed 100px will be 100 pixels in height. In
the second - if the element is empty, it will not have any height, or
if it has some content - its height will change accordingly.

To put things to work in your case, simply add style="width: auto;" or
style="min-width: 100px;" directly in the server declaration of
RadEditor. However, please, have in mind the min-width is not supported
by IE6, so to make it work in IE6, add style="_width: auto;" if you
decide to use min-width. The underscore hack is visible only by IE6, if
the page is in standards compliance mode.

Sincerely,
Tervel
the Telerik team

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Charles Peper

I guess what I was looking for is a control that functions as as a non-programmer would expect in multiple browsers,
I don't want to write my own work-a-rounds for different browsers and I don't want to test the control in different browsers.
Personally statements such as: "it is in fact expected, standards-compliance browser behavior" mean nothing to me when I am evaluating a controls functionality. When I am looking at a control, I am looking at whether it works. What I need is the text to be in the box. So for me, a control has a bug when text is displayed in areas outside of the controls boundaries and end users say "well that's screwed up". If I respond to their comments by telling them that having text spewed over the page is "standards-compliance browser behavior", it is not the experience they are looking for.

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